skill

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, some communities in the Philippines consider gossiping so odious that they’ve outright banned it. But aside from the difficulty of enforcing this sort of ordinance, should gossip really get such a bad rap? Yes, in its rawest form, gossip is a strategy used by individuals to further their own reputations and interests at the expense of others. Studies that I have conducted confirm that gossip can be used in cruel ways for selfish purposes. At the same time, how many can walk away from a juicy story about one of their acquaintances and keep it to themselves? Surely, each of us has had firsthand experience with the difficulty of keeping spectacular news about someone else a secret. When disparaging gossip, we overlook the fact that it’s a...

In the workplace, women are now as good as men when it comes to computing performance, but there is still a gender gap when it comes to confidence, according to our new research. As professors of business, we studied how well men and women in midlevel business jobs performed on computing tasks. We also asked them to rate how they thought they did. Study participants were randomly assigned basic, intermediate or advanced problems on laptops, tablets or mobile devices, while seated, standing or walking slowly. We found no difference in the performance between men and women in the total number of questions answered correctly or the time taken to answer the questions. In only one scenario did men perform slightly better – while completing a basic task, on a tablet, while seated (76.3% corre...

Tag: skill

Women equal men in computing skill, but are less confident